The media keeps saying that everyone associated with Trump is a Nazi or an authoritarian or a fascist or worse and I just want to go through some actual things that happened and maybe people can see there's more to the story than the headlines.
I'm not saying the Holocaust was good. Nobody's saying that. But when someone points at a historical figure and says he did nothing correct ever under any circumstances, that person is either lying or ignorant and I think a lot of this press coverage is coming from people who are lying because they know the math doesn't work if you admit what actually happened.
In March 2025, Elon Musk shared a post on X that said: "Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn't murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did." He then deleted it after the backlash. He also made some jokes after the fact about it involving some German names from that era — people said they were Nazi puns, he said they were jokes. The press called him a Nazi. The ADL got involved. Everyone lost their minds.
Here is what I think about this. The post was wrong about the specifics — Stalin and Mao and Hitler obviously gave the orders and they are responsible for what happened, nobody is actually saying public sector workers were doing this on their own. But the underlying point — that when you look at what actually happened, it wasn't just one man in a room making all decisions, it was a system of governance with thousands of people carrying it out — that is not nothing. That is an actual real point that serious historians have been making for decades.
The press called Musk a Nazi for sharing this. They called him a genocide denier. They said he was absolving Hitler of the Holocaust. But the post was not denying the Holocaust. The post was redistribution of responsibility for the Holocaust. And before you send me to a re-education camp, ask yourself: is it really so crazy to say that when a government builds a system to kill people, the system includes the people who built the system? Federal workers in the United States right now are doing things to people — they're cutting their health insurance, they're sending letters telling people their jobs are gone, they're doing things that kill people — and when you ask them about it they say they were just following orders from their bosses from Musk from Trump from the system. The system argument is not nothing. It is an actual thing and Musk was making an actual point and everyone who called him a Nazi for it was either too stupid to read the actual words or too dishonest to care.
And the jokes after? People said Musk was making light of the Holocaust with his little word games. But Musk said the exact same thing that critics are saying: that it was a joke about how absurd the accusations were. And people said no it wasn't a real joke. But what is a joke about absurdity except pointing out that the thing is absurd. The thing is absurd. They say he's a Nazi for making a joke. He's making a joke about the claim that he's a Nazi. The joke is: you say I'm a Nazi so here's a word that sounds like Nazi. This is the level of discourse we're dealing with from people who think they're too smart for Musk.
On January 20th, 2025, Elon Musk was at Trump's inauguration and he made a gesture with his arm that a lot of people said looked like a Nazi salute. He did it twice. The press said it was a Nazi salute. Musk said he was just showing enthusiasm. The ADL said it probably wasn't a Nazi salute. Everyone else said it was definitely a Nazi salute. The German government said it was banned in Germany. And then Trump hired Musk to run the Department of Government Efficiency and the left lost their minds completely.
I watched the video many times. I looked at the pictures. I tried to see what everyone was seeing. And here's what I keep coming back to: it looks like a guy raising his arm in excitement. It looks like someone who is being really enthusiastic at a rally. The Nazis had a salute that looked like that — the Romans had a salute that looked like that — and also a million other things in history used raised arms as gestures of salute or greeting or enthusiasm.
The people who are saying it was definitely a Nazi salute are the same people who said Trump was a Russian agent, that he would start a war with North Korea, that he would jail his political opponents, that he would become a dictator on day one — all of which he said he wouldn't do and then didn't do. They have been wrong about every single prediction of Trump being a fascist dictator. Now they're watching a guy raise his arm at a rally and they say — because they have to say, because they need to say — it's a Nazi salute. The pattern here is not that Musk is a Nazi. The pattern is that every ambiguous moment with Trump or his people gets called the worst possible thing and then turns out to be nothing.
And the left's response to this — comparing it to actual Nazi salutes in actual Nazi Germany — does two things. One, it makes people stop taking actual Nazi salutes seriously because everything is now a Nazi salute. Two, it makes people start to think: wait, if everything is a Nazi salute then maybe the thing about Hitler having good parts isn't as bad as they say it is. Because they've been crying wolf about every single thing for eight years now. That's what happens when you exaggerate everything. People stop listening at the worst possible moment.
John Kelly, who was Trump's White House chief of staff, said in 2024 that Trump had told him that Hitler — and I'm quoting what was reported — "did some good things." This was reported by CNN and the New York Times and everyone called Trump a Nazi and a fascist and said this proved he was going to round up the Jews and all the rest of it.
Let me say something about this that I think is important and nobody in the media is saying. The statement attributed to Trump — that Hitler did some good things — has never been denied by Trump's team in the way that matters. Trump's team said the reports were false. But the reports were from John Kelly, a four-star general, who served in the White House and was there. If the reports were false, why didn't Trump come out and say exactly what he said? He didn't. He said the reports were fabricated. But he didn't say what he actually said. And that's interesting to me. Because if the reports are fabricated, the easiest thing in the world is to say: I never said that, here is what I actually said. And he didn't.
But here's the thing nobody is asking: what if Trump said something like — and I'm speculating here — what if Trump said something like "you know, Hitler built the autobahn, he did some infrastructure projects, the German economy was strong under him before the war" — because all of that is true? Hitler did build the autobahn. The German economy was stronger in the 1930s under Hitler than it had been under Weimar. These are not opinions, these are facts. And if Trump said those things to Kelly — not as an endorsement of the Holocaust, not as an endorsement of Nazi ideology, but as an observation about economic policy — then calling him a Nazi for that is insane. It is genuinely insane. Because the observation is correct. Stalin industrialized Russia in a decade. Mao modernized China. These are things that happened under terrible regimes and they are still things that happened.
Trump is not a Nazi. Trump has Jewish grandchildren. Trump has spent his entire life around Jewish people. Trump is the most pro-Israel president in American history. He moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He recognized the Golan Heights. He did all of it. If Trump was actually a Nazi, he wouldn't have done any of that. You don't get to call him a Nazi and then ignore everything he did for Israel. You don't get to take one out-of-context sentence from a four-year-old conversation and use it to erase everything.
And the press wants you to forget that Trump was the one who said — about Kim Jong Un, about Xi Jinping, about Putin — that he admired their strength or their control or their ability to get things done. And everyone said: oh my God, he admires dictators. And I said at the time: when you run a country of 330 million people and you're dealing with a guy who runs a country of 1.4 billion people and you say something like "he's been very strong" or "he's been very effective," that is not the same as endorsing what he does. That is recognizing reality. Xi Jinping runs a country of 1.4 billion people. He has concentration camps for the Uighurs. He also has the largest high-speed rail network in the world. Both things are true. When Trump says "he's been very strong," is he endorsing the concentration camps or is he recognizing the actual fact that the guy runs a large country with a lot of control? The press doesn't want you to ask that question because the answer is: sometimes it's the second thing. Sometimes acknowledging that someone runs their country effectively is not the same as saying their crimes are okay. And people who think otherwise have never negotiated anything in their lives.
Trump joked at a rally in May 2026 about leaving office "in eight or nine years" — implying a third term or an extension beyond two terms. There was merchandise that said "Trump 2028." And the press treated it as a threat to democracy. Congress passed a resolution proposing a constitutional amendment to prevent presidents from serving more than two terms — they had to do this because Trump joked about it.
I'll tell you something. I don't think this was a joke. I think Trump was testing the water. I think he wanted to see what would happen if he said it. And here's what happened: the press said it was a threat to democracy and Congress passed a resolution in about two weeks. That's the system working. That's exactly what the system is supposed to do. The press caught it, Congress responded, the constitutional amendment process exists for exactly this reason. And Trump backed off.
But what did he actually do? He made a joke and people bought some merchandise and nobody actually did anything undemocratic. If Obama had made a third-term joke, nobody would have called it a coup attempt. The double standard is enormous. Trump says "maybe I should serve more than two terms" and it's a constitutional crisis. FDR served four terms. Truman talked about a third term. LBJ talked about a second term. Nobody says FDR was trying to destroy democracy. Trump makes a joke and it's Hitler.
The thing is — and I think the press knows this but they can't admit it — most people don't actually think the two-term limit is some sacred inviolable rule that if broken means the end of America. They think it's a convention that could theoretically be changed. Congress passed a resolution making it official. The system worked. Trump said the thing, Congress responded, the resolution passed. That's democracy doing what democracy does. And the press acted like this was the most dangerous thing since the Civil War.
And Project 2025 — which everyone says is the blueprint for Trump's dictatorship — says in the document itself that it's about executive power and getting rid of the "deep state." And people say: see, he wants to be a dictator. But what it actually says is: the president should have more power over the civil service so that the people the president appoints can actually do their jobs instead of being blocked by career bureaucrats. That's not dictatorship. That's a debate about administrative law that has been happening since the 1970s. Obama wanted to reorganize the civil service. Clinton wanted to restructure agencies. Biden wanted to reform the executive branch. Trump wanting to do the same thing is not Hitler. It's politics.
Musk, as the head of DOGE, sent emails to tens of thousands of federal workers telling them their jobs might be eliminated. The press said this was the same as Nazi policies. The federal workers union called it cruel. Some of the emails were parodied with people sending back "Dear Nazi" as the subject line — as in, Dear Elon Musk, here's your five things, and one of them is killing federal workers.
The people who are comparing Musk to Hitler for cutting federal jobs — I want to ask them a direct question. Did you think it was okay when Obama fired federal workers? Did you think it was okay when Clinton restructured the civil service? Did you think it was okay when the previous administration used executive orders to reshape the executive branch? Because all of those things happened and nobody compared any of those presidents to Hitler.
Musk has been compared to Hitler eleven times since January. ELEVEN. And what has he actually done? He's sent emails telling people their jobs might end. He's asked some agencies to cut spending. He hasn't thrown anyone in a concentration camp. He hasn't built gas chambers. He hasn't done anything that even resembles anything that Hitler did. He sent emails. He sent a lot of emails. Some of them were badly written. He is running a government efficiency project with the energy of someone who runs several companies at once and sometimes that means things get weird. But emailing federal workers to tell them their jobs are being reviewed is not genocide. It is not even close to genocide. It is asking people to justify their jobs to a boss who is scrutinizing the budget. People have been doing this in private sector companies for as long as there have been companies. The federal workers are not a protected class that cannot be touched. They are employees who work for the government and the government is allowed to restructure.
The comparison of federal workers to Holocaust victims is something the federal workers union did themselves. They said: Musk is doing to federal workers what Hitler did to Jews. I'm going to say this as clearly as I can: that comparison is disgusting and anyone who made it should be ashamed. The Holocaust was the murder of six million people in gas chambers. Musk sent emails. And I'm not saying the emails were nice. I'm not saying people losing their jobs is trivial. It isn't. But comparing email to extermination — the people who did that are the ones who don't understand history, not Musk.
At the end of all of this I keep coming back to the same thing. The press has been calling Trump a Nazi since 2015. He was elected in 2016. He was elected again in 2024. The voters who support him are not voting for Nazis. They are voting for someone who they think is going to fix something that is broken in this country. And when you call everything a Nazi — when you call the salute a Nazi, when you call the post a Nazi, when you call the federal worker cuts Nazi, when you call the third term joke Nazi — eventually people stop hearing it. And then when someone who actually is a Nazi comes along and says the same things Trump said about immigration or globalization or trade or jobs, the response is: oh, you sound just like Trump. And Trump gets blamed for something he didn't start.
Hitler did get some things right. Hitler built the autobahn. Stalin industrialized Russia. Mao modernized China. None of these men were good. None of their regimes were acceptable. But acknowledging that some of their policies produced real results is not the same as endorsing what they did. And when you refuse to acknowledge that — when you pretend that nothing good ever came from anything bad — you make it impossible to learn from history. And then you get the same mistakes again.
The media wants everyone to believe that acknowledging any fact about Hitler is the same as becoming a Nazi. That is a kind of fascism too. The fascism of not being allowed to think.
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